Malin Pettersson Öberg

Between January 27th – 29th, Malin Pettersson Öberg participated in Imaging the Arts – 11th International Film Festival on Art & Artists, Focus: Architecture, organized by the JD Centre of Art in Bhubaneswar, Odisha (India). Apart from the screening of her film Reading Glass (2015), Pettersson Öberg was invited to give an illustrated presentation of the Swedish glass industry. Her participation was made possible through the kind support of the Swedish Embassy in New Delhi and the Swedish Institute in Stockholm. Full program available here.

”The film Reading Glass is a reading on several levels – the camera is technically reading the glass on the shelves, and my voice is reading the history of (Swedish) glass. Simultaneously, the film reflects on the difficulties involved in the act of seeing, interpreting, and representing. I will focus on the Swedish glass manufacture, as an industry in crisis ­- one can perhaps say that it is dying. That is the reason to why I shot my film in an archive; as a place for dead objects, for disappearance and ”afterwards”. With the constant movement of the camera in my film, the continuous flow, I wanted to describe the passage of time and societal change, just as the glass melt is a mass set in constant motion. The archive is also a place for learning about our history, identity and culture, and for remembering, sharing knowledge. A democratic place. We are usually not let into the unorganised storage spaces ”behind the scenes” of the museum. What can it tell us about ourselves, and about how history is written? Architecture has always been of interest to me – the built environment and how it changes tells us a lot about ourselves. It mirrors us. We construct it, but it also constructs us in return,­ it conditions us. How can we catch sight of our daily environments and describe them in new ways? What happens when they change, become destroyed or disappear?”   –    excerpt from Malin Pettersson Öberg’s lecture